State v. Winters

SHRUM, Judge.

A jury convicted Isom O. Winters (Defendant) on four counts of sale of a controlled substance. He was sentenced to a total of 20 years in the Missouri Department of Corrections. At trial, Defendant made a Batson challenge charging a racially-biased motivation for a peremptory strike of a venireper-son and a gender-biased motivation for the same strike made by the State. The trial court overruled Defendant’s Batson challenge regarding alleged racial and gender bias, finding that the State presented both a race-neutral and gender-neutral reasoning behind his challenged peremptory…